Legal experts worry expungement proposals currently being considered might cause more harm than good
The push to legalize recreational marijuana use in Missouri is coming from multiple directions, with a handful of proposed initiative petitions and at least one bill, and potentially more, backed by Republican lawmakers.
Each hopes to place the issue on the 2022 ballot for voter approval.
And each proposal also includes a provision that, while often overlooked in the marijuana debate, is considered a transformative piece of the legalization puzzle — the expungement of nonviolent marijuana offenses from criminal records.
The proposals differ on how they handle expungement.
Some propose an “automatic” system that would have the courts identify the old offenses and seal them on people’s records. Others would require people to submit a petition and pay a fee.
How to go about expungement remains up for debate. But the necessity of its inclusion appears a settled matter.
“Every conversation should start with criminal expungement and how the war on drugs has been part of the extension of systemic racism,” said Brennan England, state director of Minorities for Medical Marijuana, an advocacy group for minority businesses.
However, legal experts who work directly with people in law clinics worry that the expungement proposals that are currently being considered in both the initiative petitions and legislation might cause more harm than good. Especially since each seeks to amend the Missouri Constitution.
“My concern is we put something in the Constitution of the State of Missouri that has this level of minutiae, some of which may not be possible,” said Ellen Suni, dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law and director the law school’s expungement clinic.
The Legal Missouri ballot initiative, which has the financial backing from many of the state’s largest medical marijuana license holders, proposes a process for Missourians with nonviolent marijuana-related offenses to automatically expunge their criminal records. It has the backing of advocacy groups such as the NAACP and Empower Missouri, who see this as an opportunity to lay seeds for expungement reform beyond marijuana offenses.
“It’s a very small stepping stone on a path to a much larger piece of legislation,” said Mallory Rusch, executive director of Empower Missouri.
Rusch, along with many others throughout the state, regards Suni and her UMKC team as leaders in the conversation for expungement reform. Suni believes the process should be as accessible as possible for people who have paid their dues to the criminal justice system.
However, the Legal Missouri proposal would etch timelines and specific expungement process details into the constitution that might not necessarily take into account the complexity of Missouri’s existing law and lack of digitized criminal records, Suni told the Independent. If the expungement program fails, then it would not only require a constitutional change but it “could be problematic down the road” for other attempts at automatic expungement.
“Then the next time somebody mentions automated expungement, it’s ‘been there, done that. It doesn’t work,’” she said.
Legalization proposals on the table
There are three initiative petitions hoping to collect…
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